Gone With the Wind

One night in 1940 my granddad slumped in the dark in the Princess Theatre, which is not here anymore, to watch Gone With the Wind, then watch it again, in the flickering dark. He was 14. Later, he would be old. Later, the lights would come up for the last time, and he would walk through the theatre's neon halo into the dark and the twelve miles home. The trains would be gone. The streetcars and buses would be gone. He would creep through the yard as dawn flickered through the pines, which are not there anymore. It would be Sunday, and he would wait for the rooster to crow over the screen door's creaking. It would be Sunday, and he would pray for his parents to pass over his sleep on their way to church, the door whining closed behind them. But all that would come later, after the lights had come up at last in the room which is not here anymore where the last train runs again through the miniature town, past the old brick courthouse, its clock creeping past some midnight or noon, over empty streets and the river disappearing at the model's edge the way the Princess would years later, engulfed in flame, Broad Street flickering neon and fire, like Atlanta spilling into the night, and the Princess, here, in miniature, painted by the flickering of a model trolley's tiny headlamps on the tiny corner of 5th and Broad in this room on the corner of 5th and Broad where the Princess, which is not here anymore, used to be, where he slumps in the room in my mind, the whole future, the whole Technicolor past flickering before him, through the dark which is not here anymore.

Published in Southern Quarterly 45.1 (Fall 2007): 53-54. Text may vary slightly from the video reading.